2017 Reading Challenge - We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Book 3 (February, Gothic)

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson

Reason for Reading: This one was a recommendation on my original classics challenge. I realised I was very low on female authors (and in fact on American authors,) and my sister suggested that I add We Have Always Lived in the Castle to my Gothic selection. In a way, that was the start of the transformation of the challenge into a way of stretching, albeit only slightly, my cultural horizons.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a short novel, recounted in the first person by Mary Katherine 'Merricat' Blackwood, the younger of two sisters living in splendid isolation with their crippled uncle in their grand old family house. It emerges throughout the story that, six years prior, the rest of the family was murdered when arsenic was mixed with the sugar. Merricat had been sent to bed without supper as a punishment, Uncle Julian took only a little sugar and Constance took none, which resulted in her being tried – and acquitted – of the murders. As a result of these events, Julian was crippled, Constance reduced to an agoraphobic shut-in and Merricat became a half-feral creature, practicing home-cooked sympathetic magic to transform their home into a mystical fortress, into which outsiders intrude only briefly before being driven away by the fear which the Blackwoods purposely cultivate. Then Charles Blackwood arrives, a cousin intent on 'helping', and Merricat's world begins to unravel.

The novel is perhaps most notable for the perspective of its thoroughly unreliable narrator, Merricat, whose fantasies of life on the Moon and the mystical duel in which she engages with Charles to purge his influence from the house border on hallucination. For her, the world is a mystical place, governed by invisible forces that she manipulates through self-created rituals. She views everyone outside her immediate circle with poisonous distain, frequently picturing those around her dead, and shelters Constance even when Constance herself tries to push at the boundaries of their circumscribed world. Hers is a simple, unsophisticated voice, but powerful enough that I barely began to challenge many of her assertions until I had finished the audiobook.

Merricat is eighteen, but acts as if she is still twelve, while Constance is some ten years older, but acts like an ingénue thanks to their near-total isolation from social influences. The narrative depicts Charles as a grasping, conniving bastard, but in his last appearance there is just a shade of doubt to cast doubt on whether this is because he was an irredeemable gold-digger, or because Merricat could see no good – indeed, no humanity – in him. Similarly, the villagers act in a truly monstrous fashion towards the family, seeming to justify Merricat's view of them as subhuman brutes, but when the 'friends' of the Blackwoods insist that they misunderstood events, there is no counterpoint to tell us if Merricat viewed some lesser offence through her own skewed lens, or if rather, after the fact, the other 'good' families of the area simply do not wish to confront the possibility that they live among people capable of harbouring such hatred.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is an odd, dark little novel, with a deceptive and lingering power in its simple prose style and a morbidly compelling central character. There is a film adaptation in post-production, and I am honestly fascinated to see how they bring this to the screen, and sceptical of the ability of the visual medium to do the story justice.